'Bernhardt/Hamlet'

[Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet is one of those plays that provokes so much commentary that there just isn’t room for it all in one post.  It also provokes a lot of critical response, some of which is both lengthy and dense.  These circumstances have given rise to two consequences here.  One is that my report on the Roundabout production of Rebeck’s play has exceeded my usual maximum length by several pages; the other is that I have had to omit discussions of some topics I might otherwise have covered—or tried to.  As has happened before, my review survey has at least doubled the length of the report.]

I saw Janet McTeer as Queen Mary in Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart back in 2009 and I wrote of her performance and that of Harriet Walter as Queen Elizabeth I: “It shows us what it’s supposed to look (and sound) like when it’s done right.”  (My report on Mary Stuart was posted on Rick On Theater on 22 June 2009.)  When I read that she was coming back to Broadway as the legendary Sarah Bernhardt (1844-1923), I knew that I wanted to see it.  The play, Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet, is a production of the Roundabout Theatre Company and my usual theater companion, Diana, is a subscriber, so she was going to be seeing the play anyway.  I asked my friend Kirk, another theater enthusiast, if he wanted to join me for what I believed would be a potentially magnificent performance, but he turned me down.  So I went up to the Roundabout’s 42nd Street house, the American Airlines Theatre, by myself for the 8 p.m. performance on Thursday, 27 September. 

According to the playwright, she was inspired to write the play during a trip to Prague, capital of the Czech Republic.  Rebeck’s family is of Czech and Slovak heritage and while visiting “to experience the culture,” they went to the Mucha Museum, dedicated to work of the Czech Art Nouveau artist Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939).  Mucha, a prominent character in Bernhardt/Hamlet who designed all of Bernhardt’s distinctive posters, created one for the 1898 production of Medée (by Catulle Mendès).  “[T]hat poster was the real inspiration for me to write a play about her,” says the playwright.  The idea gestated for a decade, then Jill Rafson, the Roundabout’s director of new play development, broached the prospect of composing a play for the company.  Rebeck, director Moritz von Stuelpnagel, and members of the cast, including McTeer, did several readings of the developing script and a workshop.  (McTeer now lives in Maine so working on this side of the Atlantic isn’t so difficult.)  Rebeck herself directed a reading of the play (with an entirely different cast) on 19 January in Washington, D.C., at the Folger Theatre, which performs in a  two-thirds-scale replica of an Elizabethan theater.  Then it went into rehearsal.  The world première of Bernhardt/Hamlet began previews on 31 August and opened on 25 September; the limited run is scheduled to end on 11 November. 

The Roundabout Theatre Company was founded in 1965 in a 150-seat space in the converted basement of the Penn South supermarket on 26th Street and Eighth Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea.  It’s mission was to produce theater’s classics and standards for a low subscription price (three plays for $5) from all through theater history, from Shakespeare to Molière to Shaw, Wilde, and Chekhov to Brecht to Odets, among many others, and the appeal caught on.  The company soon moved to a movie house on 23rd Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenues that previously showed porn films.  Over the years, despite a brush with bankruptcy in the 1980s, the company grew from the 1970s to the ’90s—its subscription base went from 400 to 15,000—in one of the most remarkable recoveries in New York’s theater world.  It transferred operations to ever larger and more accommodating theaters: the Union Square Theatre (also known for some seasons as the Christian C. Yegen Theatre; 1985-91) and the Laura Pels Theatre at the Criterion Center in Times Square (1995-99). 

Having expanded its repertoire to include not only classics (Hamlet, Hedda Gabler) and standards (The Women, The Pajama Game) but new works by both established (Molly Sweeney by Brian Friel) and emerging writers (Lynn Nottage’s Sweat), the company now operates five theatres: the 740-seat American Airlines (formerly the Selwyn Theatre), Studio 54 (the former nightclub), the Stephen Sondheim Theatre (previously the historical Henry Miller Theatre)—all three Tony-eligible, the (new) Off-Broadway Laura Pels Theatre, and the Roundabout Underground Black Box Theatre, both in the new Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theatre (both housed in the old American Place Theatre on 46th Street, west of 6th Avenue).  With over 30,000 subscribers today and an annual budget of about $60 million, Roundabout plays to somewhere around 1 million theatergoers a year and has won 36 Tonys, 51 Drama Desks, 5 Olivier Awards, 62 Outer Critics Circle Awards, 12 OBIES, and 18 Lucille Lortel Awards.

Theresa Rebeck was born in Kenwood, Ohio, in 1958 and earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Notre Dame in 1980, following that with three degrees from Brandeis University: an MA in 1983, an MFA. in playwriting in 1986, and a Ph.D. in Victorian era melodrama, in 1989.  Thinking of herself primarily as a storyteller, Rebeck’s plays “tackle tough questions about us as individuals, and about our society,” says producer Evangeline Morphos.  “They are political, but never didactic.  The story is always rooted in the humanity of the characters and in the power of the language.”  As the New Yorker describes her work: “Her scenes have a crisp shape, her dialogue pops, her characters swagger through an array of showy emotion, and she knows how to give a plot a cunning twist.   Rebeck is funny and principled, and her work reflects these qualities.”  Based now in  Park Slope, Brooklyn, her stage writing has appeared on Broadway (Seminar, Dead Accounts) and Off-Broadway (The Family of Mann, Omnium Gatherum), and she’s written for film (Harriet the Spy, Trouble – which she also directed) and television (Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Smash).

“There are five kinds of actresses: bad actresses, fair actresses, good actresses, great actresses,” Rebeck quotes Mark Twain as asserting in a line, spoken in her play, the producers use as a sort of epigraph for the show.  “And then there is Sarah Bernhardt.” Bernhardt/Hamlet is set in 1897, when Rebeck posits that “the Divine Sarah” is setting out to tackle her most ambitious role yet: Shakespeare’s Hamlet. (The play will première in May 1899.)  Over the course of two hours and twenty minutes (including one 15-minute intermission), as Bernhardt (McTeer) rehearses scenes from Hamlet with the rest of the cast—including Constant Coquelin (Dylan Baker), who plays the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Lysette (Brittany Bradford), Raoul (Aaron Costa Ganis), and François (Triney Sandoval), members of Sarah’s troupe—she realizes that something is not quite working for her as the Prince of Denmark.  There’s a great deal of discussion and argument about a woman playing a male role, Shakespeare’s greatest, and of a character who lives solely by words and never seems to act.  Finally, in desperation, she turns to her current lover, France’s greatest living playwright, Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner), and demands: “I want you to rewrite Hamlet.” Bernhardt may be Rostand’s muse, but he is astounded at her request and frustrated in his attempt to reimagine Hamlet without Shakespeare’s poetry.  

Other prominent figures on the Parisian theater scene—Alphonse Mucha (Matthew Saldivar), the poster artist; Louis (Tony Carlin), Paris’s leading theater critic; along with Rostand—are debating whether Bernhardt has taken on too much, has overstepped the bounds of convention, and is even defying social norms, if not nature itself.  "No one wants to see a woman play Hamlet," insists Rostand.  She is buoyed by her devoted son, Maurice (Nick Westrate), but challenged by Rostand’s neglected wife, Rosamond (Ito Aghayere).  There are scenes of Hamlet in rehearsal (one the arrival of the courtiers Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Hamlet’s  school chums, played by Raoul and François, recalling Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, one of my all-time favorite plays); a performance of the famous “nose scene” from Rostand’s most famous play, Cyrano de Bergerac, which premièred in December 1897 with Coquelin in the title role; and considerable drama, comedy, and romance. 

I should add that the play is largely talk, all pretty static, but that there are those interspersed scenes of Bernhardt rehearsing Hamlet and the one of Coquelin doing Cyrano.  These performance scenes, especially the Cyrano, don’t really blend in and I was thinking later that Rebeck may have inserted them to relieve all the talking.

While many of the characters in Bernhardt/Hamlet are historical—Benoît-Constant Coquelin (1841-1909), Rostand (1868-1918), Alphonse Maria Mucha (1860-1939), Maurice Bernhardt (1864-1928), Rosemonde Gérard [Rostand] (1866-1953)—and the basic plot element, Bernhardt’s production of Hamlet, is factual (the international stage celebrity toured the world with it, including appearing in New York City for eight performances in November and December 1900), Rebeck has imagined most of the rest of the play.  For instance, Rostand and Bernhardt were friends—she starred in his La Samaritaine (1897), many times playing the part the author wrote for her; she originated the title part, Napoléon’s son (another “trousers role”), in L’Aiglon (The Eaglet, 1900), also created for her; and she did Roxane, Cyrano’s love interest, in many revivals of the play—and the renowned actress took many lovers, but there’s no evidence that Rostand was one of them.

There’s also no evidence that Rostand labored on an adaptation of Hamlet for her.  Bernhardt performed a French rendering of Hamlet, credited to two other writers, with the poetry intact.   (In Rebeck’s play, even as Rostand is struggling to make the adaptation she wants, Bernhardt is rehearsing the original anyway—the English version with all the famous Shakespearean language.  Even the scene from Cyrano Coquelin performs uses the well-known Brian Hooker English translation.)  Though Bernhardt was a critics’ darling in Paris, the character of Louis is a composite at best, and Rebeck’s “re-creation” of Bernhardt’s Hamlet rehearsals and her discussions of the play and the role with Rostand, Coquelin, Mucha, and her troupe are invented so Rebeck can explore questions about women and power, the legacies of playwrights and actors, the roles of thinking and feeling in the theater, and Shakespeare’s place in our collective cultural imagination. 

(In one piece of advice, the veteran actor Coquelin tells Bernhardt to let the “iambs” guide her through Shakespeare’s lines.  This doesn’t really make sense since Bernhardt and her troupe performed in French and a French version of Shakespeare wouldn’t be based on iambic pentameter, an English-language meter.  It’s an English-language quip that doesn’t work in context.)

Roundabout’s production of Bernhardt/Hamlet is a good performance—from the whole cast, not just McTeer—but the play isn’t as wonderful as Jesse Green made it sound in the New York Times (“. . . so clever it uplifts, so timely it hurts”).  The audience was very enthusiastic (and the house was full—there had even been a bunch of stand-bys), but I found the play very contrived, as if Rebeck had come up with a message—gender distinctions in general, but especially in the arts—and then constructed a play around Bernhardt to fit it.  She’d already decided to write a play about Bernhardt so she seems to have mashed the two together—her chosen subject and theme.  My problem—one of them--is that I’m not convinced that Bernhardt had any of the thoughts about gender inequality and casting taboos Rebeck attributed to her.  I haven’t done any specific research on the matter, but as far as I know, Bernhardt decided to play Hamlet simply for the challenge—artistic, not social—and because she’d already played all the female roles in the Shakespearean canon. 

(Because, it seems, McTeer is English, all the other actors adopted British accents, except Saldivar as the Czech poster artist.  Maybe, for all her talent, McTeer can’t do a convincing American accent.  All the rest of the company seem to be Americans.  In any case, dialect consultant Stephen Gabis did a fine job.  I just wish it hadn’t been necessary.)

On the other hand, theater folk might want to see this play anyway because . . . it’s all about actors!  Yes, there’s a playwright in it, and a critic and a poster artist, but it’s still about actors and acting.  For that reason alone, I’m betting that Bernhardt/Hamlet will live on after McTeer finishes with it because actors will always want to perform it—and I daresay, scenes from Bernhardt/Hamlet will be showing up in acting classes as soon as the script is published because so many of them are two-character debates that stand alone structurally.  (I should probably say “actresses will want to perform it,” even if that’s sexist today, because it’s not just about acting, but women acting, often in contrast to men acting—and whether the one is fundamentally different from the other.)

Don’t interpret my complaints as suggesting that the play is actually bad.  It’s not at all.  It’s just that Green oversells it in the Times.  I will say that I loved the staging—Beowulf Boritt’s set is magical, like a grown-up version of a toy theater.  It reminded me that, at base, theater is magic.  I used to say to my NYU graduate schoolmates, who were almost all very dismissive of stage Realism, that there’s magic at work when you can go into a theater and, knowing it’s all fake, be made to believe that you’re watching real life as it’s happening.  (I’ll never forget my reaction to seeing Pat Carrol become Gertrude Stein in Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein Gertrude Stein at the Provincetown Playhouse back in June 1980.  I literally found myself thinking, ‘Man, Stein’s a really fascinating person.  I’m so glad I got to meet her.’  I had to remind myself constantly that I was watching an actor in a play.  And remember, I was an actor back then!)

Those who remember theater history, how back at the turn of the 20th century, when electric lighting and mechanized sets were just being developed, may recall that there used to be “performances” of just the set and tech—no actors or script—to show off the new theater magic.  Audiences apparently came because it was all astonishing and new.  That’s what this production made me feel like.  (The last time I felt that at a theater was at A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.  I posted that report back on 16 October 2014.)

Built on a carousel that holds cramped, but naturalistically detailed settings for the backstage work area and rehearsal space of Bernhardt’s theater (historically, she owned and managed the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Paris, renamed Théâtre Sarah Bernhardt, in 1897), the sidewalk table area in front of a Parisian café, Rostand’s study, and Bernhardt’s dressing room, Boritt’s settings revolve into place.  The actors walk along the stage before the carousel as various façades rotate behind them, dramatically covered by original orchestral string music by Fitz Patton, as if the characters were passing through Paris streetscapes.  The American Airlines’ apron is only dimly lit at these moments, but the façades on the revolve are lit from within, giving the glowing impression of a world behind Parisian windows.  (The haunting lighting is by Bradley King.)  Like I said: magic!

Toni Leslie-James’s costumes had to cover three types of period attire, and did so sumptuously.  She created Belle Époque garb for the Parisians of 1897, with voluminous gowns for the women (and an elegantly fabulous (if too modern—it would dazzle on the red carpet today) party dress for McTeer’s Sarah Bernhardt); a set of Hamlet costumes for Bernhardt’s troupe of players, which included some very tall, black boots for McTeer (she really did get the best costumes!), and, for the single Cyrano scene, some swashbuckling 17th-century breeches, doublets, and plumed hats for Coquelin and his cast.  Leslie-James’s costumes and hair styles and wigs of Matthew Armentrouth add greatly to the fantasy feeling Rebeck and von Stuelpnagel ordained for Bernhardt/Hamlet. 

I said that all the performances were good, particularly Baker’s Coquelin and Harner’s Rostand.  (Coquelin makes a little joke at the beginning of the play that he’s appeared in Hamlet many times, but he’s always been cast as the gravedigger.  He’s grateful to Bernhardt that he’s playing Polonius and the ghost of Old King Hamlet in her production.  In reality, Coquelin played—you probably guessed it—the gravedigger in the actual Bernhardt Hamlet in 1899!)  Coquelin, for whom Rostand wrote the role of Cyrano to allow the celebrated actor to show off all his talents,  was the quintessential Romantic performer, the dominant style of the period; Bernhardt was a proponent of a more natural style of acting (by the standards of the Romantic 19th century theater), in the vanguard of the coming Realism.  Baker’s performance is a study in teaching an old theater dog (he was 56 at the time of the play—only a dozen years from his death) new acting tricks as Bernhardt coaxes him toward a more naturalistic performance.  Still, Baker’s Coquelin is the bold actress’s most unshakable supporter.

Rostand is more conflicted, if also more invested.  In Harner’s hands, the famous playwright is torn between his passion for his beloved Sarah and his duty to his wife and colicky baby at home, and between his devotion to Bernhardt, no matter what she does, and his frustration and deflating ego when he tries to revise Hamlet according to her wishes.  Harner plays the writer as almost two men, one in the presence of his beloved and beguiled by her, and one when he’s away from her and free to say what he thinks.  (In my opinion, Rebeck’s Rostand is the best male part in the play—and the best role after Sarah Bernhardt.  Unhappily, I’m  way too old for the part: he’s only 29 in 1897!)

The cast all holds its own against McTeer, who, nevertheless, dominates the production—and why wouldn’t she?  The play’s named after her character twice, really.  In 1996, Bernhardt/Hamlet’s producers want us to know, the London Telegraph dubbed her “one of the finest classical actresses of her generation,” so it’s probably little wonder she creates (or “recreates,” after Rebeck) this character.  This Sarah Bernhardt may have been written by Theresa Rebeck, but it’s Janet McTeer’s Sarah Bernhardt we get to know.  (That’s not entirely surprising as the actor was part of the development of the script from very early and almost certainly made an imprint on the nascent character.)  She’s also had some practical experience playing Shakespeare’s leading men, having portrayed Petruchio, the suitor of the title character, Katherina, in a 2016 Shakespeare in the Park production of The Taming of the Shrew.  (Other classical performances McTeer has given in New York are the Mary Stuart mentioned earlier and Nora Helmer in 1997’s A Doll's House, also on Broadway, the performance for which the above-quoted encomium was penned.  She’s also appeared here in contemporary plays, God of Carnage in 2009-10 and Les Liaisons Dangereuses in 2016-17.) 

McTeer’s physical stature doesn’t hurt her domination of any stage on which she appears: at six feet, she towers over all the other women and stands head to head with many of the men around her.  (Baker and Harner are both 6'1", for example.)  It’s not her height that allows McTeer to take over the stage, however; she’d probably do the same if she were as petite as Bernhardt, who was about a foot shorter than her portrayer.  What McTeer does, first of all, is commit totally to her character and what she’s doing.  I never for a moment considered that her Bernhardt didn’t believe what she was saying or what she wanted.  (My quibble about doubting that Bernhardt had intellectualized about doing Hamlet the way Rebeck imagines is about the writing, not the acting.)  I find the arguments and debates predetermined and artificial, but I always felt that McTeer’s Bernhardt was sincere in her statements. 

One of the play’s points is that Hamlet is a man of words, but not action, that he “speaks and speaks but does nothing.”  But words can be actions, and McTeer takes control of both her words and her actions in Bernhardt/Hamlet.  In words that aren’t used in Rebeck’s play, Hamlet admonishes the Players: “Suit the action to the word, the word to the action”—and that’s exactly what McTeer does.  At the same time, it seems as if she’s having a great time doing it all.  (Before rehearsals began, she acknowledged, “She was an eccentric, forceful character. . . .  That will be a fun part of rehearsals!”)  It’s not hard to see why, either.  She gets to play one of theater’s most celebrated actors (about whom she says she already knew a good deal because, among other reasons, Bernhardt “was a much bigger star in Europe than she probably was over here”) and one of its most exalted roles (“It's such an extraordinary role”) at the same time!  Watching McTeer enjoying herself at her work makes it hard not to share in the joy, despite any reservations about the material.  (It also makes me envy her, frustrated actor that I am.)

On the basis of 41 published notices (some of which are from out of town and even abroad—interest in this pay seems far-flung), the website Show-Score gave Bernhardt/Hamlet a fairly mediocre average rating of 70 (as of 6 October), with 58% of the reviews positive, 32% mixed, and 10% negative.  Show-Score’s highest-scoring review was a single 90 for Splash Magazines (an on-line lifestyle magazine based in Wilmette, Illinois), backed by four 85’s (including the New York Times and Theatre Reviews Limited); the lowest score was a 40 for the Wall Street Journal, preceded by three 45’s (including the Hollywood Reporter and New York Magazine/Vulture). My survey will cover 22 reviews.

In the Wall Street Journal, which received Show-Score’s lowest rating, Terry Teachout lamented, “I wish I could say otherwise, for her premise is promising, but ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’ . . . fails to deliver.”  He went on to observe, “It’s the kind of show at which you laugh—if you laugh, which I didn’t—because you feel you should, not because you can’t help it.”  Having noted that Bernhardt hasn’t left a lot of evidence behind to “tell you what her acting was like,” Teachout acknowledged “that this leaves Ms. Rebeck plenty of room in which to maneuver,” but then added, “The bad news is that she doesn’t seem to be sure what to do with it.”  The problem, the WSJ reviewer found, is that “‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’ never manages to decide whether it’s a comedy à la ‘Noises Off’ or a dead-serious play about a great artist stymied by the prejudices of the 19th-century culture into which she was born.”  He explained:

The rehearsal scenes, whose over-obvious humor is mostly rooted in clichés about the vanities of actors, endeavor to be much funnier than they really are, while the serious scenes, in which Bernhardt explains why she is equal to the task of playing Hamlet her way, are unintentionally funny (“Shakespeare has more than power—he has strength . . . and I match him for that!”).  The result is the worst of both worlds, a preachy backstage farce.

Teachout went on: “‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’ is rife with other miscalculations, including the fact that it incorporates two extended sections written by other hands,” one of the Hamlet scene rehearsals and the Cyrano scene.  “In both cases, the unintended consequence is to make you wish you were seeing ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Cyrano’ instead.”  (The review-writer pointed out two things I felt as well: In the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern scene, “[w]hether or not she intended to do so, Ms. Rebeck is inevitably inviting the viewer to compare ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’ with Tom Stoppard’s ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,’ which is, to put it as gently as possible, a mug’s game.”  Teachout also found that “no one in this production even pretends to be French—Ms. McTeer is English, and nearly everybody else follows her lead—thus contributing to the general air of uncertainty that hangs over the proceedings.”) 

While agreeing that McTeer “is a distinguished stage actor,” Teachout continued, “I was struck . . . by how completely unfunny she was . . . .  More significantly, she isn’t interesting as Bernhardt’s Hamlet: You never get the feeling that she has anything particularly original to say about the role, which can’t help but undercut the whole premise of ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet.’”  The Wall Street Journalist reported that “Moritz von Stuelpnagel . . . does what he can to remedy the glaring deficiencies of ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet,’ aided at all times by the members of Ms. McTeer’s top-of-the-line supporting cast.”  He ended by stating, “Beowulf Boritt’s turntable set, as befits a play about a 19th-century stage idol, is sumptuously elaborate.  Would that set, director and cast had been used instead for another, better play.”

Jesse Green’s Times review only got a score of 85 from Show-Score, its second-highest rating, despite the lavish praise he laid on the Roundabout production, which he dubbed “a muscular comedy about a woman unbound.”  Calling the presentation “a deluxe Roundabout Theater Company production,” the Timesman found  that, until the play’s second half, Bernhardt/Hamlet “is breakneck backstage comedy, swiveling like its Lazy Susan of a set (by Beowulf Boritt) among scenes of romance, Rialto gossip, rehearsal drollery and literary exploration.”  In act two, Green felt, “he play loses some of its internal logic” because “it fritters its focus on a new set of concerns, including Rostand’s wife, . . .; his new play “Cyrano de Bergerac” . . .; and Bernhardt’s adult son . . . .”  The result, the reviewer felt, is that “we cannot now invest ourselves in developments that seem to lead away from, instead of toward, the character we care most about.”  He backs off a bit, suggesting that “the time away was useful to the extent that we now see the character less in the context of her own personal quest and more in the context of the play’s central question: ‘Is the female self exposed the same as the male self exposed?’”  In any case, “with great effort,” the playwright “does eventually bend this all back to Bernhardt.” 

As if in direct reply to Terry Teachout’s assessment of McTeer’s performance in Bernhardt/Hamlet, Green declared that the actress:

turns her tragic intensity inside out.  Trying on emotions as if they were samples at a perfume counter, she flits through moods both pungent and evanescent.  Dudgeon quickly melts to delight and narcissism to apology.  She hardly needs Rostand, Louis or Mucha to define her; she is author, critic and self-portraitist in one. . . .  [Furthermore,] as Bernhardt locates the heart of Hamlet Ms. McTeer the comedian becomes a riveting Shakespearean, exploring new pathways through scenes with the ghost and with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.  Suddenly you want to see Bernhardt—or Ms. McTeer—as everyone in the canon.

In conclusion, the Times reviewer found that Bernhardt/Hamlet, “directed with wit and verve by Moritz von Stuelpnagel, is a deep-inside love letter to the theater as a kind of laboratory in which experiments in both art and equality are possible.”  In the end, he pronounced: “That’s more than a wicked valentine:  It’s a vision.”  (All this only scored 85 on the Show-Score scale?  I can’t fathom their criteria!)

Barbara Schuler called the Roundabout’s world première an “intelligent but uneven play” in Long Island’s Newsday, as Rebeck’s several “concepts get lost in too many prolonged discussions, and director Moritz von Stuelpnagel allows the words to fly at such a torrential pace that it's often difficult to keep up.”  Unsurprisingly, the Newsday review-writer reported, “McTeer commands the stage from the start,” and then conceded that “it's the intimate, almost reverential look at this actress and all her eccentricities (say, sleeping in a coffin) that allows us to forgive the flaws in the work and makes it so stimulating.” 

amNewYork’s Matt Windman called Bernhardt/Hamlet a “contemplative and jumbled backstage comedy” that explores “sexism and female empowerment and delve[s] into layered, dramatic analysis.”  The production, “directed in an overly aggressive manner,” asserted Windman, “is too discursive for its own good, leading to minimal and muddled plot development,” even though it “contains many witty lines and delves into important topics.”  He complained, for instance, that “way too much time is spent lumbering through scenes from ‘Hamlet’ and debating Bernhardt’s notion of rewriting ‘Hamlet’ to make it less poetic.  By the second act, the play becomes tiresome and feels long-winded.”  The amNY reviewer concluded, “‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’ is an inspired, timely and interesting idea for a play—if only it had been better executed.”  (Windman raised a curious question I not only hadn’t considered myself, but no other reviewer I read brought it up, either: “One wonders wonder whether Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful run for the presidency played a role in the development of ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet.’ There is an obvious connection between the hostility faced by both Bernhardt and Clinton as they ventured into traditionally male territory.”)

David Cote labeled the play an “energetic but scattershot period homage” in New York’s Observer, feeling that though “[b]rimming with ideas and saucy banter, it’s lively but exhausting, manic and overstuffed, too much—possibly like the Divine Sarah was in life.”  In Cote’s assessment, “Rebeck has much on her agenda, too much”:

One could imagine a more compact version of this material in 90 minutes of real-time at a rehearsal.   Instead, Rebeck opts for a grand, multi-layered affair with lots of exposition, ginned-up histrionics, and florid speechifying.  But there’s not enough narrative to sustain two and a half hours of what is, essentially, the run-up to Bernhardt’s next gig.  Scene after scene blows by, delivering much verbiage—some of it witty and deft—but the drama itself hardly rolls forward.

Paralleling some of my own cavils about the bi-lingual (and Anglo-American) nature of Rebeck’s play, Cote observed:

For theater historians [I guess that means me], one technical issue is bound to rankle.  Rebeck doesn’t address the fact that Bernhardt’s Shakespeare was in French.  The actors in this Roundabout Theatre Company production speak in English accents; when they rehearse Hamlet, they quote the original verse.  Since this is an American play in English that makes sense, but some indication that the ensemble is discussing (or dissing) Shakespeare in translation would be welcome.  The historical Bernhardt commissioned a 12-scene prose adaptation of Hamlet from Eugène Morand and Marcel Schwob, but we never hear it—in French or English.  (One strand of the plot, Rebeck’s nifty invention, is that Bernhardt first asked Rostand to adapt Hamlet.)  When the legendary actor Constant Coquelin (Dylan Baker) counsels her to stick to the stresses of the Bard’s iambic pentameter, it’s nonsensical: English is a stress-timed language, but French is syllable-timed—each syllable gets (more or less) the same stress.

The Observer demurred some when it came to the production:

On the plus side, it’s a bouncy, handsome production, and the actors a merry bunch.  Director Mortitz von Steulpnagel presides over a deluxe design that includes picturesque, rotating sets by Beowulf Boritt, delectable costumes by Toni-Leslie James and gauzy, flattering lights by Bradley King.  McTeer struts and frets to swashbuckling perfection in fluffy poet shirt, leather pants and fuck-thee boots.  Not that McTeer needs anything to increase her tremendous personal charisma.  That low, smoky voice, flashing eyes, and jubilant life force:  McTeer carries much of the play on her lanky frame with infectious glee.

In the New Yorker, Sarah Larson warned, “Indecision haunts” Bernhardt/Hamlet, complaining that “Rebeck’s seriocomic script itself feels indecisive, sometimes relishing its rich feminist premise—“A woman who cannot do anything is nothing.  A man who does nothing is Hamlet”—but too often forsaking seriousness for blithe repartee.”  Larson explained that “Bernhardt frets mightily, not just about playing Hamlet but about money, poetry, and her married lover, the playwright Edmond Rostand (Jason Butler Harner)—concerns with lower stakes than avuncular regicide, but consuming nonetheless.”  She praised the leading actor’s performance: “McTeer’s spirited performance, heavy on flourishes of hand and arm, culminates in a joyous sword fight.”

In one of Show-Score’s 45-rated (second-lowest  score) notices, Sara Holdren bemoaned in Vulture/New York magazine, “There’s a special kind of cringing reserved for plays that seem like they’ll be up your alley and instead get aggressively on your nerves.”  She went on to characterize von Stuelpnagel’s production as “overwrought” and Rebeck’s play as “clamorous but rudderless” and added, “I could feel my heart sinking.”  Holdren’s indictment:

This is the kind of play that, especially if you’re a woman, leans out into the audience and tries to grab you by the shoulders, half pleading and half threatening through gritted teeth: Like me! You’re supposed to like me! I am so Right Now! Do your job and LIKE ME.  Well, as the saying goes, sorry not sorry.  Loud, basically laudable politics don’t automatically make for good theater (if they did, we’d be living in a golden age), and nor, unfortunately, do interesting historical figures.  Even though Sarah Bernhardt . . . is certainly intriguing, I can get that much from her Wikipedia page.  In attempting to translate historical record (and a fair amount of historical fiction) to drama, Bernhardt/Hamlet falls into the gaping trap of the bio-play.  Full of period frills and actorly flourishes, it fails to convey either astonishing mythos or full, authentic humanity.  Instead, it fills its protagonist’s mouth with passé sentiments, ideas whose risqué gloss has faded, packaged as relevant and revelatory. 

Asserted the woman from New York, the playwright’s notion “to free Bernhardt from this barrage of male analysis” would make “an exciting project, except that the voice Rebeck gives Bernhardt says very little that we haven’t heard before.”  Of the staging, she added that the director “has decided that the best way to treat Rebeck’s scenes is to motor through them, aiming for punch lines and big licks.  He’s trying to milk the play for its comedy, and he’s cutting the legs out from under any real feeling that might be there”—including, with the exception of Baker, from the actors.  “Even McTeer, who’s got charisma to burn, gets undercut by von Stuelpnagel’s seeming insistence on ‘bigger, louder, faster, breathier!’” reported Holdren, who affirmed that McTeer, “for all her innate playfulness and power, can’t save this reincarnation of the Divine Sarah.  The great actress ends up coming across as slightly behind our time, rather than ahead of her own.” 

Bernhardt’s “realization of her own mortality, in the face of the immortality of the character she’s decided to take on, lies at the heart of the protagonist’s struggle in Bernhardt/Hamlet,” asserted Holdren.  “Or, it could have.  In the end, it’s a play about ego and insecurity.”  After noting yet another theme at which the playwright hints but doesn’t pursue, the New York review-writer continued:

It’s as if Rebeck discovered this incredibly rich, deep vein of ore, and instead decided to mine a collection of nearby, more accessible deposits. One of the frustrations of Bernhardt/Hamlet is that it has no sustaining engine.  Instead of driving into an unanswerable question, a gnawing central concern to hold the play together, Rebeck gives us a collection of individual scenes with neatly constructed arguments.” 

Holdren concluded that Rebeck and McTeer are

torn between the seduction of Bernhardt’s myth and the more unknowable essence of her humanity—between the compulsion to hold up this spectacular woman from history as both an artistic legend and a feminist hero, and the less flashy, much more personal impulse to tell the story of a woman of the theater who’s wrestling with ego, uncertainty, mortality, and Shakespeare.  I know which story interests me more, but Bernhardt/Hamlet never fully makes the leap.  Instead, it spends its time plucking low-hanging fruit and getting its characters into arguments that feel like cul-de-sacs.  It can’t decide whether it wants to ridicule or re-envision Hamlet’s lack of resolve, and in the meantime, it never quite finds its own.

Variety’s Marilyn Stasio called Rebeck’s portrait of Sarah Bernhardt a “flattering account” with an “enthralling performance” from McTeer.  “If only Rebeck had shown us more scenes of Bernhardt’s mastery of Hamlet,” lamented Stasio, “we might have been more convinced of her claim to the role.  Instead, the playwright has given a feminist slant to the actress’ daring.”  McTeer gives a “glowing performance” and the proceedings are “all interesting, even provocative, but what’s missing is some reasonable dramatic conflict, personal or professional.”  The Variety reviewer’s final assessment is that the production’s direction is “tightly choreographed” and the “solid cast . . . encircle[s] Bernhardt like planets following their star.  And blazing stars they certainly are, both McTeer and Bernhardt, yoked in a dynamic character study that, for all its shining moments, is no play.”

In Entertainment Weekly, Leah Greenblatt, dubbed Bernhardt/Hamlet a “bright, lushly executed showpiece,” which the playwright and director keep “moving with brisk, chamber-piece choreography.”  The production features an “ingenious set” and a supporting cast who “swan around in Toni-Leslie James’s dazzling costumes.”  The EW reviewer declared, “The glue in it all is McTeer,” who’s “also the best, most vivid thing in nearly every scene: No one’s note-perfect Hamlet maybe, but above all to her own self (and, you’d like to imagine, Sarah’s too) true.”

Labeling Bernhardt/Hamlet a “boulevard dramedy,” Adam Feldman of Time Out New York complained, “What Bernhardt/Hamlet perversely refuses to give us, however, is a coherent sense of Bernhardt’s performance in the role.”  While Rebeck’s Bernhardt “wants to portray the prince as young, active and vigorous[,] . . . McTeer speaks her passages from Hamlet simply, maturely and thoughtfully.”  Remarking on the contrast between the acting Rebeck posits Bernhardt did with all reports of her actual style, Feldman also noted one of the same incongruities I pointed out: “When she rehearses and analyzes greatest-hits monologues—’To be or not to be,’ ‘What a piece of work is man,’ ‘O what a rogue and peasant slave am I’—Bernhardt delivers them in Shakespeare’s original English.  But she would have been using a French verse translation, so her quibbles over specific words like ‘mortal coil’ don’t quite make sense.”  Though “the characters seem like vessels for larger points about artistic creation and women’s access to power,” Feldman found, McTeer “is incapable of being dull” and the supporting cast is “strong.”  Nonetheless, “While it is sometimes ungainly, the play is amusing on its own inside-theater terms.” 

David Rooney pronounced on the Hollywood Reporter, another 45 on Show-Score, that  “despite many tantalizing elements and historical material ripe for exploration from a contemporary feminist perspective, Theresa Rebeck’s Bernhardt/Hamlet doesn’t add up to a play.  At least not a satisfying one.”  The casting of McTeer as Bernhardt, Rooney believed, was “inspired,” with her “quicksilver command and agile wit,” and “[c]ertain lines seem hardwired to prompt cheers of approval from a woke audience, such as Sarah’s indignation about the narrow range of parts available to women in her profession.”  When the celebrated actress declaims, “I will not go back to playing flowers for you fools,” a reference to  the role she’s played over and over again, Camille (“The Lady of the Camelias”), and others like it, the HR reviewer acknowledged, “It’s a feisty dismissal, but it comes rather late in a scattershot play”; “it comes off as egomania, which is amusing but seldom emotionally involving.” 

 

Rooney reported that “Rebeck builds scant dramatic interest or momentum” into the play, “more intent on milking laughs from depicting one great artist (Bernhardt) measuring herself against another (Shakespeare), deeming the latter inferior.”  The review-writer complained:

But for too much of the play, Rebeck seems more tickled by Bernhardt’s gift for riding roughshod over all obstacles—steamrolling any conflict in the play along with them—than by what her quest might actually represent in terms of her frustrations and her desire to break with the conventions of the era.

He found that “the play in most respects is a missed opportunity, despite the pleasure of watching the willowy, silver-tongued McTeer careen from high camp into righteous hauteur.”  Indeed, backed by “fine work in the solid ensemble,” Rooney reported, “McTeer has a grand old time with all this, prancing about in a performance of flamboyant physicality, rapier-like responses and intoxicated self-regard.” 

On TheaterScene.net, Victor Gluck styled the play as “a backstage comedy,” whose “limitation . . . is that is both light comedy and mainly chitchat.”  Director von Stuelpnagel “is good with his actors and keeps the play moving along but he can’t overcome the play’s deficiencies.”  The cyber reviewer thought that Bernhardt/Hamlet “will be a guilty pleasure for many theatergoers with its backstage theater gossip,” he concluded that it “remains a light comedy, not a major historical drama.”  In the end, Gluck advised, “Enjoy Bernhardt/Hamlet for what it is but the play ultimately seems less than the sum of its parts.

David Finkle of New York Stage Review found Bernhardt/Hamlet “vastly overwritten” and recommended that “someone . . . work more closely with Rebeck at maximizing its potential,” suggesting “that she rethink the comedy-drama.  She might consider either ruthlessly editing it herself or finding someone who can.  Were she to come up with a 90-minute redaction, she would likely have herself a potent piece.”  The  supporting cast is “strong,” declared Finkle, but he asserted, “At the moment, her major asset is McTeer, who moves around the stage with the grace and steadfastness of a ripple crossing a stream.” 

For Theatre Reviews Limited, another review that  scored an 85 on Show-Score, David Roberts labeled Bernhardt/Hamlet as a “compelling new play” in which the playwright “captures [Bernhardt’s] passion with ethos, pathos, and logos.  Her writing connects with the audience on significant and enduring levels.”  The “ensemble cast” finds “the delicious layers in Theresa Rebeck’s script” and McTeer, Baker, and Harner “deliver towering performances under Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s exacting direction,” reported Roberts. Ending the play with the film clip of the real-life Bernhardt dueling Laertes, the TRL blogger felt, “is a fitting conclusion to an important dramatic exploration of the life and passion of Sarah Bernhardt and a celebration of women and power.”  

On Talkin’ Broadway, Howard Miller cautioned that “the play is not entirely successful at juggling what amounts to three major themes, it is eminently entertaining, chock full of humor, heart, and smart and snappy dialog, with fine acting and strong production values all around.” Miller found, “Both McTeer and Rebeck do splendidly with delineating the struggle over unpacking the enigma that is Hamlet.”  He deemed, “Two of Bernhardt/Hamlet’s themes, the challenges of performing Hamlet and women's constant battle against a sexist society, are well presented in the play. . . . It's the third theme, the story of the great romance between Bernhardt and Edmond Rostand, . . . that is underwritten.”  The failure, as Miller saw it, is that “the speeches suggest they are equals in talent and passion, the performances . . . fail to fully convey this.”

TheaterMania’s Hayley Levitt dubbed Rebeck’s play “a piece that’s as audacious as it is delicate.”  Levitt went further, asserting, “Amplify both ‘audacious’ and ‘delicate’ to their most luscious extents and you have Janet McTeer’s performance as Sarah Bernhardt—not to mention her magnetic moments as the Danish Prince.”  The TM reviewer found, “It takes a good amount of meandering through Act 1 to see where exactly this plane is headed, but director Moritz von Stuelpnagel guides it along playfully.”  But it’s McTeer’s performance to which Levitt gives the most attention:

With a wingspan that fills the stage and a resounding voice that commands consideration, there is not a moment that McTeer is merely pretending to be the Divine Sarah.  Even Bernhardt’s layers of pretense (and as a lifelong actress portrayed in her 50s, there are many) are sewn permanently into McTeer’s skin.  She performs as a woman who doesn’t know how not to perform, and needs a standing ovation just as much as, if not more than, she needs to pay her bills—and those are piling up.

Samuel L. Leiter wrote on his blog, Theatre’s Leiter Side, that Bernhardt/Hamlet “is a mixture of high comedy, theatrical history, dramaturgic satire, and feminist polemic” that’s getting “a rumbustious but only partly satisfying” production at Roundabout.  The script is “episodic,” noted Leiter, and “despite Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s brisk direction, meanders through its scenes.”  While the supporting cast “offers standard Broadway performances, sturdy, vocally strong, and unremarkable,” McTeer “gives a tour de force performance” with “the fire, the gumption, the humor, and the fury, not to mention the voice, the energy, the presence, and the intelligence to make us watch her no matter what she does.”  Leiter’s conclusion is: “Bernhardt/Hamlet is a lumpy but often enjoyable play about a theatrical legend, with a feminist message that our current generation will appreciate.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale reported that “there’s some damn good, expressive and provocative writing in Bernhardt/Hamlet, and the opportunity to see an exceptional artist like McTeer draw every complex nuance out [of] Rebeck’s best words is an experience worthy of any Broadway season.”  Then he demurred: “The frustrating part of Bernhardt/Hamlet is what comes between the playwright’s best moments, specifically when interesting themes are introduced but barely explored.”  Calling his complaints “quibbles,” the BWW review-writer touted “the opportunity to see Janet McTeer’s thoroughly engaging performance.”  Dale felt that von Stuelpnagel “provides a sturdy production,” but his parting notion was that “while there is much good work in BERNHARDT/HAMLET, the major takeaway for audience members leaving the theatre may be the desire to soon see a Broadway marquee announcing McTeer/Hamlet.” 

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp declared that the Roundabout mounting of Bernhardt/Hamlet, a “busy and always witty” play, is a “classy premiere” that “captures the star power of both its main character and her interpreter.”  Sommer found, however, that “while McTeer is 100% successful in capturing Bernhardt’s powerful persona, this history-a-la-Rebeck is clever but doesn’t score as high.”  (Like me, Sommer thought the play gets “a bit too talky.”) 

In Show-Score’s top-rated review (90), Splash Magazines, Charles E. Gerber proclaimed, “This night, thanks to the imaginative playwriting of THERESA REBECK and the astute staging of MORITZ von STUELPNAGEL, the remarkable JANET McTEER has brought back to our metropolis the electric thrill of witnessing Sarah Bernhardt’s moments of undoubted brilliance in assaying the role of HAMLET.”  Calling the Bernhardt/Hamlet “a play that resonates today with the overview of women and power,” he further advised, “That Ms. McTeer  is fully up to that thorny task at hand is reason enough, avid theatergoer, to march, walk, RUN, to the American Airlines Theatre,”  Gerber added that “her support of players are right there with her in incisive, and often effectively comic, portrayals” under the “inventive and incisive direction” of von Stuelpnagel. 

On WNYC, a New York City National Public Radio station, radio, Jennifer Vanasco, labeling the play a “dramedy,” felt that “the way Rebeck strings [the play’s many subjects] together makes this almost two-and-a-half-hour production feel too slight.”  Though Vanasco figured that “[t]heater nerds will be gratified by the extended backstage wrangling” and “everyone will likely find pleasure in Beowulf Borritt’s detailed sets,” she felt that  “most are likely to be frustrated with the drama's muddy story and emphasis on low-hanging fruit.”  Then she drops a little bombshell: “And yet, the play is saved—by the stunning actor Janet McTeer.”  

Roma Torre of NY1, the proprietary news channel of Spectrum, the Manhattan cable system, declared, “Theresa Rebeck is a gutsy playwright.”  She was referring to the daunting casting challenge for the role of Sarah Bernhardt in Bernhardt/Hamlet, but, Torre confirmed, “Rebeck did get lucky, casting the incomparable Janet McTeer.”  Nonetheless, the NY1 reviewer thought, “while topically resonant, ‘Bernhardt/Hamlet’ is dramatically inert.”  While the play’s central conflict, whether a woman should play the part of a man “opens up a host of intriguing issues, Rebeck offers something more of a dialectic rather than a cohesive drama.”  For all the potentially interesting ideas the play opens, “it's overlong and muddled.”  Director von Stuelpnagel “impressively colors the production with authentic period gloss, teasing us with quite a bit more than the text can deliver” and, with praise for Baker and Harner, Torre found, “McTeer delivers magnificently, evoking the full range of emotions and wild impulses that define a legend.  And in the moments when she speaks the bard's speech, she is divine.” 

[I have never quoted so many reviews at such length in any play report before.  But some of the criticism was very interesting and well-composed and treated some points that I didn’t raise.  (Of particular interest is Sara Holdren’s review from Vulture/New York magazine; I direct curious readers to the Vulture website to read Holdren’s notice in full: http://www.vulture.com/2018/09/theater-review-theresa-rebecks-bernhardt-hamlet.html.)]